“Trifecta,” said my friend Becky on the phone, although she lives in Colorado; if there’s a racetrack around here, it’s news to me.

“Trifecta what?” I asked her.

“I just got home from a job interview where they asked me not one, not two, but all three of the idiotic job interview questions you’re always railing about.”

“All three?” I asked her. “That’s amazing. Were these people otherwise reasonable, or was the place a petri dish full of amoebas?”
“Amoebae, I think,” said Becky. “I think ‘amoebae’ is the plural for ‘amoeba.'”

“Either way, what were these people like?” I pressed her. “Toads,” she said. “I almost didn’t go to the interview at all, because the recruiter who set up the appointment said ‘Don’t be late’ to me before she hung up. I knew then and there that I didn’t want to work with these people, but like you always say, it’s good to go on the interview and get more practice.”

“And grow your mojo,” I added. “Oh, brother!” said Becky. “This was the world’s most slam-dunk mojo-growth interview, let me tell you. As horrible as it was to talk with the toad people, it is nice to remember that I have something valuable to offer, too. It was nice to walk out of there thinking ‘If I live to be a million years old, I’ll never work for people like that.'”

I was sitting in front of the Christmas tree a couple of weeks ago, thinking about MBAs and job hunting. I have a soft spot for folks in full-time graduate programs, because it’s hard to spend two years with your brain split down the middle. When you go back to school to improve your career-type marketability, you have to study hard in order to get good grades and learn everything you can. You’re expected to be focused on your studies. At the same time, you’ve got to keep one eye on the horizon — on your post-graduation job search, that is – which can be unnerving, since the full-time program doesn’t allow you to do lots of things that you’d do if you were actively job-hunting right now. Read more…

I’m sure the guy is dead now, whoever he was, but I have a major bone to pick with whoever invented resumes. What a horrible idea! Who could expect us to get twenty, thirty or sixty years of awesome life and work experience across in a two-page document? The idea of a resume itself is what my sporty friends would call a non-starter.

On top of the sucktastic two-page resume format, we’ve got other obstacles in our way when we try to get across our power and heft on the job hunt. Most of us have been taught to write our resumes in a style we could only call Corporate Zombiespeak. It’s the worst. We’re taught to describe ourselves as Results-Oriented Professionals and Motivated Self-Starters, whatever the heck those awful terms mean. We’re taught to talk about our Skills and Competencies.Read more…

Cassandra had been looking for a job for three or four months when she chatted with me after a presentation I gave on new-millennium job hunting. “I had the most upsetting experience recently,” she said. “I interviewed for a Marketing job, and I had every qualification listed in the ad. I could tell, though, that I was losing the two interviewers during the interviews. I couldn’t keep their attention.”

“Who were these guys?” I asked her. “They’re two founders who started an agency together,” she said. “I got about fifty minutes with the first one and then maybe thirty-five with the second guy. The conversations were just off, a little. I was trying to talk about my experience, and I couldn’t get them excited about anything.” Inwardly I grimaced.Read more…

I wrote my first Pain letter after reading your article about Pain letters last week. Hurrah! I got a call from the hiring manager the next day. I have an interview set up for next week.

Now I am avid to write a bunch more Pain letters, but I am curious. When the hiring manager called me to set up the interview for next week, I had already sent in a standard cover letter with my resume, weeks ago. I never heard anything back. Why did the hiring manager respond to my Pain letter so quickly, after ignoring my earlier application?

As much as we feel sorry for job-seekers (and I do, in spades) I feel sorry for hiring managers and resume screeners, too. Can you imagine reading letters all day that begin with “Dear Hiring Manager, I saw your job ad and I was intrigued…?” We read about Motivated Self-Starters and Results-Oriented Professionals and Leaders of Cross-Functional Teams until we want to stick pins in our eyes. It’s atrocious. A stack of resumes attached to cover letters a foot high might yield two micrograms of actual human spark, if we’re lucky.

Let me be quick to acknowledge that it’s not a job-seeker’s fault the stack of cover letters and resumes (See Resume, attached!) yields so little life or individuality. Job seekers have been trained to write a cover letter and a resume in Zombie Language, or what I call Boilerplate Corporatespeak. It’s the language Darth Vader writes in, and every bureaucrat on the planet. It’s the language job ads are written in, and the language policies are written in (you know the ones: “Effective April 15th, it will no longer be permissible to use the back entrance between the hours of eight and six…”).

That’s a horrifying way to communicate, and as bad as it is to read that stuff in corporate life (or to get a Zombie memo from your kid’s school) it’s even worse to read about a person described that way. Zombie Language is not the way to bring across a brilliant and vibrant job-seeker’s heft and spark.

A lady called me to get a quote for a story. She was writing a story about job-search tips. I gave her a tip (I think it was about salary negotiation) and when the story came out, the lady who wrote the story sent me the link. As I read through the job-search tips, I got depressed. A lot of them were awful, “here are new ways to grovel” tips, but one bit of advice really stood out. “Since lots of employers won’t hire people who are unemployed,” this advice-giver began, “don’t indicate on your LinkedIn profile if you’re out of work.”

Let’s break this horrendous advice down. First off, do you think a person is going to make it through the whole interview process without having to share the news that he or she isn’t working? Isn’t that going to emerge sooner rather than later, like when the recruiter at this unemployed-people-hating company asks, “So, are you still working at Domino’s Pizza?” Are you going to lie, at that point? Is that what the job-search-advice-giver is recommending that a job-seeker in that situation do? Read more…

Over the past couple of years, hordes of Baby Boomers found Facebook; this year, half the people I’ve ever worked with seem to have had the same “Aha!” concerning their personal branding.

After spending twenty or twenty-five years without giving a thought to their personal brands, these folks came to the realization in 2012 that they can’t carry on without one. I think it’s great — anything that promotes self-awareness and intention is a good thing in my book. At the same time, a lot of folks are confused about personal branding.

They write to me and ask me to give them spicier, sexier words for their resumes or their LinkedIn profiles. “But I don’t know you,” I protest, and they reply “But as you can see, I’m a versatile Business Professional with a bottom-line orientation…”

One gentleman called me to talk personal brands not long ago, and I gave him this piece of advice. “The words that describe you come at the end of the process,” I said. “There is a much more interesting piece of work to do first. You could call it exploration or self-discovery or career reinvention.” “I’m not interested in any of that,” said the fellow. “I just need to beef up my LinkedIn profile with some specifics.”

“I will help you,” I said, “if you’ll answer a set of questions I’ve got for you. Are you game?”
“I am game,” he said. “Let’s go.” Read more…

My friend Carolyn has a job interview coming up, but she’s already got reservations. “The thing about this interview,” she told me, “is that the woman I’m supposed to meet is very into letting me know how important she is and how insignificant I am.”

“How did she send that message?” I asked Carolyn. “In every email message and phone call,” she said, “the recruiter told me how many people are waiting to talk to her and how little time she has. She told me about the high standards she has and how much her clients rely on her. It seemed to me that it was more important for her to make sure I was aware of her fabulousness than to find out anything about me.”

“Oh, she’s an amoeba!” I laughed. “You know how that works, right, Carolyn?”

“Remind me,” she said. Here’s the story on amoebas in the business world — pay attention, because you’re bound to run into one of them before long (if you haven’t already). Read more…

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